How to avoid cart abandonment in your e commerce

When we say basket abandonment we are taling about those purchases which are started by our clients but which are not finished, leaving the basket abandoned eventually.

There are several techniques in order to minimise those sale looses which we can clasify in two stages:

1. Pre basket abandonment: we try to minimise the basket abandonment by our clients maximizing conversion.
2. Post basket abandonment: once the basket has been abandoned, we act quickly in order to retrieve the purchase offering some kind of discount or promotion

In this post we are going to talk about the techniques we can use in the Pre basket abandonment stage.

One of the main causes of basket abandonment is price. It is now really easy for on line buyers to compare prices as they have several price comparison sites such as Google Shopping, Kelkoo, etc.  just a few clicks away. They can easily get a full list of competitors selling the same product ordered by price. If our online shop prices are not competitive, the client will abandon the basket to make his purchase in a competitor´s site which offers a better price. It is not about being strictly the cheapest, but to offer competitive prices, that make our clients forget about searching elsewhere as they are faithful to our brand.

In order to find out where our prices are competitive or not, we must use a price monitoring tool with which we can get the following information:

• A list of products where we are not competitive, allowing us to filter by brand and/or category
• Change price alerts which inform us soon about changes in the competition so we minimise the time in which our site could potentially loose sales
• Measurement of the competitiveness index so we can be sure of which competitors have higher or lower prices.
• Measurement of price wins and price loose rates, that allows us to know how often our price is better or worse in the market.

By using a competitors price monitoring software, we can design and implement a wining price strategy minimising the basket abandonment rate and increasing our clients data base.